Short Exposure AP on Orion Atlas

I picked up a nice 9.25 SCT and needed a better mount than my CG5. There was a used Orion Atlas that had been hypertuned (I forgot the company that did the tuning) in the area, so I picked it up. It has been 6 months or so and I have only been able to use it 2 or 3 times do to weather and schedule conflicts. I want to be able to do astrophotograhy so I set the mount up over the weekend. My first step was to try out short exposure, unguided. With my C8, I could get nice sharp images for 30 to 60 seconds with no issues. With the Atlas and the 9.25 I am seeing large streaks. When I would expose with the c8 for too long the streaks would be uniform. With the Atlas I am seeing blobs. For short exposures it almost looks like double stars and with large exposures there are several blobs. It almost seems like the mount is sticking and not tracking smoothly. Below should be a 100% crop from a 20 second image. This was an attempt at M57, which was almost at zenith.

Am I crazy for trying to do short exposure at f10 on a C9.25 and expecting better results?

I wonder if your RA balance was either too perfect or slightly west-heavy. If that was the case the mount could be bouncing back and forth through the RA backlash as RA motor tries to keep up with the scope's RA motion. A very slightly East-heavy balance would solve that problem.

That would be a possible explanation for the blob portion of the string-of-blobs streaks you are showing. The streaking itself would likely just be a matter of polar alignment.

I tried to make sure it was spot on. I didn't realize it could be "too" perfect. So if I am standing behind the mount (where the eyepiece/camera is) the RA will be moving counter-clockwise, so I want the balance to be slightly heavier on the west side so the end that is moving "up" would be lighter?

It looks like you have at least two issues that need to be dealt with. The 50 second exposure shows at least four bright spots for each star. The trailed streaks in that image should be from polar misalignment but the "clumping" of photons into the bright spots is indicative of a short term, probably around 5-8 second, oscillation between two positions.

As recommended, you need to keep the mount a little heavy on the E side of the pier. If you release the RA clutch, whatever is on the E side should start sinking towards the ground.

Imaging with a scope that has a 2400mm focal length requires a very accurate polar alignment. When I align my Atlas using the polar scope, I can get only 20-30 second images with a 1000mm focal length scope. Anything longer requires a drift alignment.

A visual drift alignment can easily take an hour or longer to do. If you use your camera to do it, each alignment check takes only a little over a minute. To check your azimuth polar alignment; do the following:1. Point the scope just W of the meridian at the celestial equator.2. Set the slew rate to 1x sidereal.3. set the camera for a 70 second exposure.4. Have the mount tracking at sidereal rate.5. Start the exposure and do the following for the indicated timesTime Action00-05 normal tracking05-35 slew East35-70 slew West

Look at the image. The bright star(s) are from the tracked portion of the exposure. The trails are from the slewed portions of the image. If you're perfectly polar aligned, the return trail will pass through the center of the star. If not, the two trails will form a V. The size of the opening of the V at the tracked position of the star is a representation of the amount of drift that occurred. The relationship of the two trails indicates which way the mount needs to be adjusted to correct the misalignment. If your first adjustment makes the V wider, you moved the mount in the wrong direction.

Repeat this process around 30 degrees above the E or W horizon (still on the celestial equator) to drift check the altitude adjustment.

The worm period on the Atlas mount is over eight minutes. There should be little if any periodic error in a 20 second image and most of a set of 50 second images should not show periodic error.

Weather and calendar conflicts have prevented me from making much progress, but I have tried again. This time I hooked up an ST80 piggyback on the C9.25 and used the NexGuide autoguider. This has helped to clean things up, but I just can not get a steady picture. Here are 2 examples.

These are both 1 minute and 25 second auto-guided exposures with a crop at 100% image resolution. The first one shows stars that are square and you can just make out individual points at each corner.

The second image has rounder stars, but then there are smaller doubles at right angles. I had the camera just about perpendicular to the axis of the Atlas. So "up" in the image should be RA and "right" should be DEC.

It appears that the mount is just jumping around in both axis. The RA was balanced East heavy and the DEC was balanced with no preference to either side.

I am interested in your thoughts as I would really like to get this working properly.